So Long as Men Can Breathe: The Untold Story of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Da Capo), by Clinton Heylin

Shakespeare's writings have attracted almost as many interpreters as the Bible. Reading Clinton Heylin's extended essay on Shakespeare's sonnets, one can't help but conclude that the entire apparatus of Shakespeare scholarship amounts to little more than a library of historical fiction. Heylin, a historian of Elizabethan England, has previously written insightfully on Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and other major figures in rock. Aside from deflating a great many theories on Shakespeare's work, Heylin draws interesting comparisons between the manuscript "bookleggers" of Shakespeare's time and the rock tape bootleggers of the '70s and '80s. Turns out, some of the doubtful Elizabethan publications ascribed to Shakespeare might have been akin to an unauthorized version of Sgt. Pepper containing mostly alternate takes and even a few tracks by Badfinger and other Beatlesque bands. ­